This is a remnant of the early repmgr days when there were no alternative
mechanisms for ensuring sufficient WAL remains available while cloning a
standby.
The purpose of this setting was to override a check for an (arbitrary)
minimum setting for "wal_keep_segments". As there's no reliable way
of determining a sensible value for this, and improvements in
pg_basebackup mean WALs can be streamed (possibly using a replication
slot) while the backup is in progress, there's no point in keeping
this around.
We will however still emit a warning about setting "wal_keep_segments"
if the configuration doesn't appear to provide any other way of
ensuring WAL is available during/after the cloning process and
"wal_keep_segments" is not set.
If the current primary (demotion candidate) still has any files to archive,
it will delay the shutdown until all files are archived. If there is a
substantial number of files, and/or the archive command executes slowly,
this will probably lead to an unwelcome delay in the switchover process.
The repmgr3 implementation required the promotion candidate (standby)
to directly work with the demotion candidate's data directory,
directly execute server control commands etc.
Here we delegated a lot more of that work to the repmgr on the
demotion candidate, which reduces the amount of back-and-forth
over SSH and generally makes things cleaner and smoother.
In particular the repmgr on the demotion candidate will carry
out a thorough check that the node is shut down and report
the last checkpoint LSN to the promotion candidate; this
can then be used to determine whether pg_rewind needs to be
executed on the demoted primary before reintegrating it back
into the cluster (todo).
Also implement "--dry-run" for this action, which will sanity-check the
nodes as far as possible without executing the switchover.
Additionally some of the new repmgr node commands (or command options)
introduced for this can be also executed by the user to obtain
additional information about the status of each node.
This is needed for better switchover control, so we can instruct
the remote repmgr to issue the appropriate server command rather
than trying to work out what it should be from the local node.
This is only relevant when cloning a standby and the node's upstream
can change after failover/switchover etc., so no point keeping the
original value around in the configuration file.
